The Person in Social Psychology

Vivien Burr

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135431914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Traditional social psychology assumes that the person has an already-existing nature that then becomes subject to the influence of the social environment. The Person in Social Psychology challenges this model, drawing on theories from micro-sociology and contemporary European social psychology to suggest a more 'social' re-framing of the person. In this book Vivien Burr has provided a radical new agenda for students of social psychology and sociology. Using concepts familiar to the social psychologist, such as norms, roles, demand characteristics and labelling, she argues for an understanding of the person where the social world is not a set of variables that affect a pre-existing individual, but is instead the arena where the person becomes formed.

Chapter 1
The individual and the social in social psychology

The aims of this book

PSYCHOLOGY IS ALL ABOUT trying to understand people’s behaviour and experiences. It constantly asks what human nature is. It asks ‘what is it to be a person?’. It then attempts to offer some answers to our questions about why people do, say and feel the things they do. But if you are a student of psychology, you will quickly learn that the discipline does not offer a single answer to this question. In fact different branches of psychology offer us quite different accounts of human behaviour and experience. For trait theorists like Eysenck and Cattell, our behaviour and experience is the outcome of personality characteristics that are ‘hard-wired’, passed down to us through genetic inheritance. For psychodynamic theorists like Freud, Klein and Winnicott the key to understanding humanity is not in traits but in age-old and unavoidable conflicts played out between parents and children in early life. For behaviourists like Watson, Skinner and Thorndike the answer is different again; we are understood here as essentially adaptable animals that learn from their experiences, so we are products of environmental events that shape and determine our behaviour. Humanistic psychologists, like Malsow and Rogers, see us as unique individuals, each one having an innate potential that we can fulfil if we are allowed to develop properly. The differences between these approaches are not just academic. They have implications for how we can and should live our lives, and for how much power we have to change ourselves and our society. An important part of our job as psychologists is therefore evaluating these perspectives, asking ourselves whether the images of humanity they present are accurate or misleading, useful or constraining, helpful or downright dangerous.

As social psychologists our task must therefore be the same. We have to look behind the theories and research that have made up this sub-discipline of psychology over approximately the last 100 years and ask ourselves what kind of persons we are and can be according to its accounts. And, just as with its parent discipline, social psychology has more than one answer to the question. Our task must be to take a close and critical look at these accounts in order to find out whether we like the look of the person lurking behind them. This isn’t always a simple matter, because sometimes the nature of this person is present by implication rather than explicitly stated. Students therefore often find that, although they become familiar with the subject matter of social psychology, they don’t see the bigger picture of the person that exists between the lines of the text book. The aim of this book is to make this person (or persons!) more visible and therefore more open to critical scrutiny.

When I was a psychology undergraduate in the 1970s it was relatively unusual for students to learn much about the historical and philosophical influences that had shaped their discipline. I think this is a great shame, as a whole generation of academic psychologists were left without some important intellectual tools with which to reflect upon and properly critique their own and others’ work. If we want to get to know someone properly, to understand how and why they see things as they do, we try to find out something about their personal history, their early life, the kind of environment they grew up in, their hopes and aspirations. In the same way, in order to understand properly the nature of the persons implicated in these social psychologies, we must know something about their history, where and why they emerged, and how the traces of their early lives can still be seen today.

However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that this is going to be an impartial account. In scrutinising the different varieties of social psychology I shall certainly be offering some comment on their strengths and weaknesses. But there is also a strong sense in which this book will be advocating a particular position throughout, and this is the view that the person is a fundamentally social phenomenon. This is a view that is consistent with several of the social psychologies covered here, so I am not advocating any particular theory but rather contrasting the different approaches to social psychology in terms of the extent to which they see the person as a social being. In effect, this will take the form of a challenge to a social psychology that analyses social phenomena at the level of the minds and behaviour of individuals. This includes much of what is usually referred to as conventional North American social psychology. It will on the other hand entail an advocacy of newer social psychologies originating in Europe (and to a lesser extent North America) as well as more sociological (but not necessarily newer) North American social psychologies.

A great deal of what is taught on undergraduate social psychology modules consists of theories and research originating in North America in the early and mid-twentieth century and being further developed today. I will therefore begin by tracing something of the history of the person in this account. I will show how this profile of the person as sketched by academic social psychologists shares many of the same features of the person as implicitly understood by ordinary people living in Western industrialised countries over the last three hundred years. We will see that we can recognise these assumptions about what it means to be a person if we look closely at the theories and research within this social psychology. The chapter will conclude by sketching the outline of a different kind of social person, one that is perhaps not as easily recognisable to us as yet.

The roots of the modern individual

It is no surprise that the historical and philosophical influences that shaped psychology were passed on to social psychology as it began to take shape as a body of theory and research. What were these influences, and how do we recognise them in our understanding of personhood today? People in contemporary Western societies share a common idea of what being a person entails, even though we do not often articulate this idea to ourselves and others.

Although we might agree that we all share a common humanity and therefore have common needs and perhaps even common human rights, we also think of people as unique individuals, each with their own abilities, talents, characters and preferences. Whether these are innate or acquired, it is this unique set of characteristics that makes us who we are and we often use these characteristics to explain why people behave and feel the way they do. Furthermore, these characteristics are thought of as relatively stable or consistent, so that we think of ourselves as being the same person from day to day, from week to week, and even from year to year. And our personality is thought to be coherent in the sense that we do not normally feel ourselves to be a random mixture of incompatible or inconsistent attributes. We certainly recognise inner conflicts, and can feel pulled in different directions by different sides of our nature, but this is experienced as a problem and one that needs resolving back into coherence. We see our actions as the outcome of rational deliberation and decision-making – at least we feel that it ought to be so. We generally see our conduct as the outcome of freely chosen courses of action. We set great store by this freedom to do as we see fit, and, since we must bear responsibility for our actions, we are prepared to publicly defend them as rational, logical and morally legitimate ones. We applaud and respect those who steadfastly refuse to waver from their beliefs in the face of coercion or propaganda, and criticise those who unthinkingly adopt the behaviour and attitudes of their peers. This is not simply a description of the contemporary individual, it is an ideal to which we feel we must aspire. We place great value upon it.

However, such a vision of humanity is a fairly recent acquisition in the history of Western civilisation. The threads woven into the contemporary individual can be traced back to developments in knowledge, thinking, religion and technology over the last few hundred years. They can be seen emerging at the end of the Middle Ages, at the start of what is known as the Renaissance, around the fourteenth century. The Renaissance period, which flourished in Western Europe until about the seventeenth century, encouraged the extension of the boundaries of learning and geographical knowledge, and saw the proliferation of scientists and explorers. It also encouraged scepticism and free thought.
The religious dogma of the Middle Ages had emphasised blind obedience to the dictates of religious leaders. The new scepticism of the Renaissance challenged this, encouraging people to form their own individual opinions and beliefs. With the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the political power of the papacy was challenged. Farr (1996) describes how technological advances at the time led to the rise of the modern individual and its prevalence in North American thinking:

The invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy further promoted [individualism] by producing active minorities who could read holy writ for themselves rather than accept the word of others, who protested at the propaganda, who dissented from the former consensus, and who failed, generally, to conform. The spokesmen (for they were men) for the pious majority represented these deviants as Protestants, Dissenters and Nonconformists. Once the representation had been formed, individuals could be identified and then persecuted. Persecution in the Old World led to selective migration to the New. This, in turn, led to individualism being a more central value in North America than, say, in Central Europe.

(p. 103)

But the real explosion in scientific activity and free-thinking came in the period following the Renaissance, known as the Enlightenment, which reached its peak in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement. Enlightenment thinkers believed in the liberating possibilities of rational and scientific knowledge. They were often critical of existing society, and believed in the possibility of progress. They were hostile to religion, which they saw as keeping the human mind chained down by superstition. Science was seen as the enlightened alternative to the religious dogma of earlier times. The truth about the world was now seen not as delivered ready-made by the dictates of religious leaders, but as discoverable by free-thinking human beings through their scientific endeavours. It was now up to individuals to find out the truth for themselves.

Enlightenment thinking was characterised by the idea that we can discover the principles governing nature by applying rational analysis and scientific method. For example, Sir Isaac Newton laid down a very few laws that could describe and predict events in the natural world very accurately, such as the movement of the celestial bodies. It was anticipated that we could eventually bring events in the world under our control through the understanding and predictive power offered by science. Scientists like Newton had had considerable success in explaining things that had previously been inexplicable and in generating useful technology, so confidence grew in the belief that science would eventually be able to find the answers to all our questions. In this period, impressive machines had been invented for various purposes. The world, including the realm of human events, was seen as a complex machine that operated under orderly, mechanistic laws and principles, just like clocks or engines, and it was expected that we could eventually, by scientific method, come to understand these laws and make predictions from them. The metaphor of things as machines is as much at the root of psychology today as it was in its infancy. Today’s cognitive science has the computer as its metaphor for psychological phenomena, just as in the past Freud saw the psyche as operating like a hydraulic system, and the early behaviourists saw the mechanism of the reflex arc as the fundamental principle of human behaviour.

The seventeenth-century philosopher Descartes was an important figure in shaping our modern notion of the individual. Descartes’ use of ‘methodological doubt’, by which he pressed himself to question all of his pre-existing beliefs and knowledge in the search for facts of which he could be certain, led him to a theoretical position that is known as dualism. This is the view that the world consists of two different kinds of things, those that are pure thought, which are subjective and internal to the person, and those that are objective, external to the person and material in nature. Even the body was seen by him as constituting part of the external (to the self), material world, and he regarded the person as an entirely mental and subjective phenomenon. He thought this because we can conceive of ourselves as existing without bodies, but cannot conceive of ourselves as existing without conscious awareness. This ‘Cartesian dualism’ therefore splits the mind from the body and locates all the important features of being a person clearly in the mental realm. It separates the subjective from the objective world, so that the person becomes an in-dwelling (or intra-psychic) being that receives and interprets information about its environment, and that environment includes other people. But how was it possible for the mind to move the body and manipulate external objects, thus bringing about effects in the material world? Descartes did not come up with a convincing account of how the mind and the body could influence each other, and it is interesting to reflect that psychology today, despite decades of research on brain structures, hormones and genetic material, still struggles with this question of the relationship between mind and body.

We can now begin to see how we have come to our current notion of the person as a free-thinking moral agent with its own unique thoughts, beliefs and values, an individual contained within its own psychological space, separated from material reality and from other individuals. Looked at in this historical context, our modern notion of what it means to be a person has not substantially changed in important respects in over two hundred years. But we must nevertheless remember that this way of thinking did not characterise earlier historical epochs and is characteristic of only some societies today. Farr (1996) goes to the extent of referring to this individualism as an ideology, in order to show both its dependency upon time and place and its power to influence our thinking:

When individualism becomes a dominant ideology within a culture, it is no longer visible to those whose ideology it is. Indeed, they often write books celebrating the end of ideology . . . They equate ideology with collective beliefs . . . When the object of these collective beliefs is the individual, this is not thought to be an ideology – rather, it is thought to be the antithesis of ideology.

(p. 104)

Psychology and the individual

Within this individualist view the social context, consisting of other people, in which a person lives may impinge upon or influence him or her, but this influence is seen as being exerted upon a person that pre-exists and is independent of that social context. The characteristics of a person could therefore, at least in principle, be described once and for all, since the nature of the person is seen as not dependent upon social context. We can see that the discipline of psychology bears the trademarks of its historical and philosophical roots. One could even say that psychology is an axiomatic example of the individualism documented above. Its subject area is the mental life and behaviour of individuals. Just as it was for Descartes, the body is seen as a vehicle for the mind and psychology’s interest in the body has been to enquire after the physiological correlates of mental events and to ask whether our psychology can be reduced to them. Psychology’s explicit aim in its experimental tradition has been to discover the characteristics of individuals in their pure form, uncontaminated by extraneous variables in the external, material and social world beyond the laboratory. It has adopted the philosophy and the methods of the natural sciences, and, like the early scientists of the Enlightenment, has committed itself to discovering the laws and mechanisms underlying events, in this case human events.

But studies of non-Western cultures provide further support for the view that individualism is not a fact of human nature but a product of history, which throws into question the adequacy of such a psychology for understanding peoples less influenced by European and North American philosophy and history. Lalljee (1996) argues that in non-Western societies, such as India and Japan, people are understood primarily in terms of their social roles and relationships rather than their psychological attributes because of the interconnectedness of people’s lives in those societies. He cites a number of studies that suggest the prevalence of a more collective or social sense of self in some cultures. For example, in a self-description task Dutch children tended to offer more descriptions of psychological traits and attitudes while Moroccan children referred to social characteristics such as group membership. In another study, self-descriptions of Japanese and North American students were compared. The Japanese students were much less likely to use psychological descriptions (such as ‘I am honest’) than the North American students, and preferred social role descriptors such as ‘college student’ and ‘father’. Even the nature of insults has been found to vary, with individualist cultures preferring references to personal qualities (for example ‘ugly’ or ‘stupid’) and more collectivist cultures making reference to the person’s relations with others or their family members.

The point at issue here is a central one for social psychologists. If we want to understand people’s actions and their experiences, should we think of people as having a basic nature (this might include both universal characteristics that could be referred to as ‘human nature’ as well as personality characteristics) which then responds in various ways to exposure to all the different social circumstances with which a person’s life presents them? Within this way of thinking, we would be drawn to ask questions like ‘How are the normal human decision-making processes affected by being a member of a group?’ or ‘How is our information-processing affected by the characteristics and behaviour of other people when we make social judgements?’. Here, other people and the social situations they constitute for us as participants are seen as events that lead to potentially describable and predictable changes in our normal, individual psychology. To put the extreme case for the sake of argument, you could say that the way to find out what people are really like would be to take away all the social variables that aff...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SOCIAL IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• CHAPTER 2: THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF BEHAVIOUR
• CHAPTER 3: ROLE-TAKING
• CHAPTER 4: GROUPS AND THE SOCIAL SELF
• CHAPTER 5: REPRESENTATIONS AND LANGUAGE
• CHAPTER 6: THE PERSON IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES